Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 1915, to a Jewish family in Manhattan.

She had a brother, David Greenglass.

She originally was an aspiring actress and singer, but eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company.

Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) and Ethel Rosenberg (née Greenglass; September 28, 1915 – June 19, 1953) were an American married couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, including providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs.

Julius Rosenberg was born on May 12, 1918, in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire.

The family moved to the Lower East Side by the time Julius was 11.

His parents worked in the shops of the Lower East Side as Julius attended Seward Park High School.

Julius became a leader in the Young Communist League USA while at City College of New York during the Great Depression.

She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she met Julius in 1936.

In 1939, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.

They married in 1939.

Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945.

He was discharged when the U.S. Army discovered his previous membership in the Communist Party USA.

Important research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls was undertaken at Fort Monmouth during World War II.

By this time, following the invasion by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the Soviet Union had become an ally of the Western powers, which included the United States after Pearl Harbor.

Rosenberg had been introduced to Semyonov by Bernard Schuster, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA and NKVD liaison for Earl Browder.

After Semyonov was recalled to Moscow in 1944 his duties were taken over by Feklisov.

Rosenberg provided thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse.

Under Feklisov's supervision, Rosenberg recruited sympathetic individuals into NKVD service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl, and Morton Sobell, also an engineer.

Perl supplied Feklisov, under Rosenberg's direction, with thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed's P-80 Shooting Star, the first U.S. operational jet fighter.

Feklisov learned through Rosenberg that Ethel's brother David Greenglass was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; he directed Julius to recruit Greenglass.

In February 1944, Rosenberg succeeded in recruiting a second source of Manhattan Project information, engineer Russell McNutt, who worked on designs for the plants at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For this success Rosenberg received a $100 bonus.

McNutt's employment provided access to secrets about processes for manufacturing weapons-grade uranium.

The USSR and the U.S. were allies during World War II, but the Americans did not share information with, or seek assistance from, the Soviet Union regarding the Manhattan Project.

He also claimed that his sister Ethel's husband Julius Rosenberg had convinced David's wife Ruth to recruit him while visiting him in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1944.

He said Julius had passed secrets and thus linked him to the Soviet contact agent Anatoli Yakovlev.

This connection would be necessary as evidence if there was to be a conviction for espionage of the Rosenbergs.

The West was shocked by the speed with which the Soviets were able to stage "Joe 1", its first nuclear test, on August 29, 1949.

However, Lavrentiy Beria, the head official of the Soviet nuclear project, used foreign intelligence, which he did not trust by default, only as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the design teams, who he did not clear to know about the espionage efforts, and the development was indigenous; considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure, it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved, if any.

In January 1950, the U.S. discovered that Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee and theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war.

Fuchs identified his courier as American Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950.

On June 15, 1950, David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage and soon confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold.

Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to be executed during peacetime.

Other convicted co-conspirators were sentenced to prison, including Ethel's brother, David Greenglass (who had made a plea agreement), Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell.

Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working in Los Alamos, was convicted in the United Kingdom.

For decades, many people, including the Rosenbergs' sons (Michael and Robert Meeropol), maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and were victims of Cold War paranoia.

When the U.S. government declassified information about them after the fall of the Soviet Union, the declassified information appeared to have included a trove of decoded Soviet cables (code-name Venona), which detailed Julius's role as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, and information about Ethel's role as an accessory who helped recruit her brother David into the spy ring and did clerical tasks such as typing up documents that Julius then passed to the Soviets.

According to a 2001 book by his former handler Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg was originally recruited to spy for the interior ministry of the Soviet Union, NKVD, on Labor Day 1942 by a former spymaster Semyon Semyonov.

In 2008, the National Archives of the United States published most of the grand jury testimony related to the prosecution of the Rosenbergs.